Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

by Gabriel Wyner

structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing.

If I tell you that my email password is mjöður, you probably (hopefully?) won’t remember it, because you’re processing it on a sound and structural level.

Unsatisfied, the researchers repeated their tests with more images, trying to determine what college students will put up with for low pay and free food. There doesn’t seem to be a limit.

This gives you valuable social points, which are sometimes redeemable for wine, cheese, and board game nights.

This rewriting process is the engine behind long-term memorization. Every act of recall imbues old memories with a trace of your present-day self.

One of the reasons why language programs and classes fail is that no one can give you a language; you have to take it for yourself. You are rewiring your own brain. To succeed, you need to actively participate.

Start with a small number of new cards (fifteen to thirty) per day; you can always decide later if you want to go crazy with your flash cards.

There’s no reason to become fluent in a badly pronounced language, because no one will speak it with you.

Take that, kids. If we stop comparing kids with thousands of hours of language exposure to adults with hundreds of hours, we’ll see a surprising trend: on average, adults learn languages faster than kids do.